Having given him this warning, she mounted her chariot drawn by swans, and drove away through the air.  But Adonis was too noble to heed such counsels.  The dogs had roused a wild boar from his lair, and the youth threw his spear and wounded the animal with a sidelong stroke.  The beast drew out the weapon with his jaws, and rushed after Adonis, who turned and ran; but the boar overtook him, and buried his tusks in his side, and stretched him dying upon the plain.

Venus, in her swan-drawn chariot, had not yet reached Cyprus, when she heard coming up through mid-air the groans of her beloved, and turned her white-winged coursers back to earth.  As she drew near and saw from on high his lifeless body bathed in blood, she alighted and, bending over it, beat her breast and tore her hair.  Reproaching the Fates, she said, “Yet theirs shall be but a partial triumph; memorials of my grief shall endure, and the spectacle of your death, my Adonis, and of my lamentations shall be annually renewed.  Your blood shall be changed into a flower; that consolation none can envy me.”  Thus speaking, she sprinkled nectar on the blood; and as they mingled, bubbles rose as in a pool on which raindrops fall, and in an hour’s time there sprang up a flower of bloody hue like that of the pomegranate.  But it is short-lived.  It is said the wind blows the blossoms open, and afterwards blows the petals away; so it is called Anemone, or Wind Flower, from the cause which assists equally in its production and its decay.

Milton alludes to the story of Venus and Adonis in his “Comus”: 

    “Beds of hyacinth and roses
     Where young Adonis oft reposes,
     Waxing well of his deep wound
     In slumber soft, and on the ground
     Sadly sits th’ Assyrian queen;” etc.

APOLLO AND HYACINTHUS

Apollo was passionately fond of a youth named Hyacinthus.  He accompanied him in his sports, carried the nets when he went fishing, led the dogs when he went to hunt, followed him in his excursions in the mountains, and neglected for him his lyre and his arrows.  One day they played a game of quoits together, and Apollo, heaving aloft the discus, with strength mingled with skill, sent it high and far.  Hyacinthus watched it as it flew, and excited with the sport ran forward to seize it, eager to make his throw, when the quoit bounded from the earth and struck him in the forehead.  He fainted and fell.  The god, as pale as himself, raised him and tried all his art to stanch the wound and retain the flitting life, but all in vain; the hurt was past the power of medicine.  As when one has broken the stem of a lily in the garden it hangs its head and turns its flowers to the earth, so the head of the dying boy, as if too heavy for his neck, fell over on his shoulder.  “Thou diest, Hyacinth,” so spoke Phoebus, “robbed of thy youth by me.  Thine is the suffering, mine the crime.  Would